Sunday, March 12, 2017

Fucking Daylight Savings Time

"Time is part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects. Time has been a major subject of religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a non-controversial manner applicable to all fields of study has consistently eluded the greatest scholars." According to Wikipedia.

For countless millennia time was judged strictly by the simple binary system of day or night.

Shamans for the neanderthals kenned out the passage of the sun throughout the year. The autumn equinox signaled the time for retreat to warmer refuges for winter. The religious hierarchy were the only ones who could tell the time. The rest of humanity day or night worked just fine and for the most part still does for modern man.

Dark - sleep.

Light - work.

That process wasn't good enough for everyone.

Yesterday all that changed with Daylight Savings and I cursed William Willett, the British busybody, who convinced his government to shift the hours of sunrise and sunset, so he didn't have to end his golf game in the waning hours of summer's dusk, but also because he was angered by the lower classes sleeping away useful daylight hours.

The desire to standardize time across the globe was the dream of western men such as Benjamin Franklin who proposed to the Paris police that they fire cannons at sunrise to wake the hoi polloi to take advantage of his adage, "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise."

Germany adopted Willett's suggestion during WWI and the rest of the world followed suit to attack the slumber of the working man.

Pattaya Ghost

About Me

OPEN CITY declared Peter Nolan Smith an underground punk legend of the 1970s East Village. In the last century the New England native worked as a nightclub doorman at New York’s Hurrah and Milk Bar, Paris’ Les Bains-Douches and Balajo, London’s Cafe de Paris, and Hamburg’s Bsir.

Throughout the 1990s Peter Nolan Smith was employed as a diamond salesman on West 47th Street in the heart of Manhattan’s Diamond District.

The 2000s were spent in Thailand running an internet company and raising his family.

More recently he was appointed the unofficial writer-in-residence to an embassy in Mittel Europa.

The constant traveler has lived for long periods of time in Tibet and the Far East; he is currently based in Fort Greene, New York and Thailand researching the secrets of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as well as putting the final touches on BACK AND FORTH his historical semi-fictional book about hitchhiking across the USA in 1974.

His website www.mangozeen.com covers news and semi fiction from around the globe with over 5000 entries over the past five years written by Peter Nolan Smith.